As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to these users is an information handling system. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may vary with respect to the type of information handled; the methods for handling the information; the methods for processing, storing, or communicating the information; the amount of information processed, stored, or communicated; and the speed and efficiency with which the information is processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include or comprise a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
An information handling system may comprise one or more optical storage drives. The optical storage drives may be read-only, writable, or rewritable. Examples of optical drives include CD and DVD drives.
Optical storage drives may experience failure errors when reading or writing data to optical storage media. Diagnosing failures in optical storage drives may be problematic for a variety of reasons. Often, when a failure error such as a read or write error occurs, the associated error code may be reported to the operating system, and the operating system or software utility may inform the user of the failure error, but the details of the failure including the media information and failure error description may never be disclosed to the user or may never be stored for later use or diagnosis. Even when the failure error information is disclosed to the user, the failure error information may be too generic, not complete, and/or inaccurate.
Further compounding the problem of diagnosing optical storage drive failures is the lack of information as to the media used when the failure error occurred. Often, the media used is not returned with the optical storage drive to the manufacturer so the information relating to the media used may not be available to the manufacturer for failure error diagnosis.